Otto Peters (1997) Industrialized Teaching

Otto Peters (1997) Industrialized Teaching and Learning is as close to a chastisement of education, and certainly academics, for failing to recognize the potential for distance education and learning. For Peters, the lack of pedagogy on the subject arose out of academia's limited scope of impending change, and academics inability to think out of the box. Peters says that main stream institutions missed the boat by not taking seriously the trend towards distance education and learning.

Academics continue to criticize distance education and learning instead of recognizing the opportunities that distance education and learning creates for professors, especially those whose work in teaching is highly sought by students, but limited by classroom and the commitment to a single institution. Peters says that distance education and learning is wrongly categorized by academics as industrialized education, and this is an accurate point. The industrial revolution has passed, and we are in the age of a technological revolution.

Distance education and learning is, and always has been, the product of the growing move towards the world reliance on technology. While Peters says that the relationship between industrialization and teaching has come to describe the relationship between the teacher and the learning process.

Peters says: But the concept of industrialised teaching and learning no longer refers to the application of individual or even several principles of industrialisation, but to the analogy between the teaching and learning process and the process of industrial production (Peters, 2)." Use of the term "industrialization" to describe any relationship in the age of technology is outdated, and out of touch. Efforts to portray it as a necessity of industrialization, because many of the students of early industrialization were factory shift workers.

This might have been accurate as a description of the students who were taking the courses, but it is difficult to say whether or not those students constituted a majority of the students utilizing distance learning. Also, in today's age of technology, it is no longer accurate to description the utilization of distance education and learning as a product of industrialization at any level. In fact, and Peters points this out, distance education and learning really is not about the relationship between the instructor and the learning process anymore.

Distance education and learning is about where society is at now. Peters quotes Rumble, saying: Greville Rumble (1995a, 19) is also of the opinion that regarding industrialisation as typical of distance education is incorrect, because proof can also be shown of the industrialisation of teaching and learning in classrooms and group instruction. If trends towards industrialisation can be verified in traditional universities, these critics claim that the characterisation of distance education as industrialised teaching and learning loses its force.

In addition, characterising distance education as the most industrialised form of teaching and learning is also regarded as out of proportion and criticised because it is claimed that this characterisation is obsolete because for some time now we have been in a post-industrialist age (Peters, 3-4)." Peters does, however, make a good point about the lack of pedagogy on the subject of distance education and learning.

There is very little I way of research and analysis on that leads to an understanding as to the progress of distance education and learning as a viable method of education. It would see that, initially, because it was perceived by educators and mainstream universities as a product of "industrialization," little effort was made in the way of pedagogy to study and analyze distance education and learning.

That failure to build a body of pedagogy around distance education and learning has probably done more to harm the potential for educators to harness the potential to what distance education and learning might have meat to educators as a group. It could have ushered in a new role and level of importance of the educator, the university professor, as both an educator, but also as an in-demand product.

Educators had the opportunity to build their own base of expertise and opportunity to gain more for that expertise as independent distance educators offering themselves to multiple universities, or as registered and licensed centers of distance education. There is still time to do this, and we can probably expect to see major changes in the.